Poles Still Feel Hurt Of World War Ii

Massacre By Russians Embedded In Memories

July 22, 1995|By Nancy Ryan, Tribune Staff Writer.

Maria Wiemeler tries to dilute the bitterness she sometimes feels toward the country that finally-after more than half a century-accepted responsibility for one of the most notorious massacres of World War II.

But as recently as a month ago, Wiemeler thought "here we go again."

The Russian government tried to make amends to her and thousands of other relatives of 21,000 murdered Polish Army officers by taking part in a memorial at a mass grave of 4,400 of the victims. Russian President Boris Yeltsin snubbed the event, however, leaving many of the hundreds of Poles who attended feeling slighted again.

The massacre's victims, including nearly 5,000 senior officers and many of the country's elite, were taken prisoner by the Soviet secret police in 1939 and then murdered in 1940 at the order of Josef Stalin.

Wiemeler's father, Mieczyslaw Frymus, a lieutenant, was among the victims. And last month, she and six other Polish immigrants traveled from Chicago to the Katyn Forest, in western Russia, for the memorial service.

Despite Yeltsin's neglect, "the whole ceremony was very moving," said Wiemeler, 56, a Harwood Heights resident.

And it made her and the other members of the Chicago contingent more determined than ever to pursue the establishment of more permanent memorials for the victims, because the Katyn site has no list of names.

Wiemeler and the group she is in, the 40-member Katyn Families Foundation of Chicago, hopes one day to see a wall, similar to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., erected in Warsaw, Katyn or the two other mass grave sites in or near Russia.

But the first step toward that is increasing awareness of the massacre, which was first uncovered by the Germans in 1943. For decades until 1990, Moscow denied responsibility for the executions and sought to blame the Germans.

Any mention of the event in Poland before the end of the Cold War was cause for imprisonment.

Here, the event is understood even less, which is why the Katyn group in Chicago recently sponsored a small exhibit on the subject at the State of Illinois Building, said Edward J. Kaminski, 69, a professor of pathology at Northwestern University's Medical School and the son of a captain in the army reserve who also was killed.

The group's members, as well as thousands of other family survivors, are convinced the Russian government still is withholding information on the massacre. And they want to get a full list of the names of the victims at all three sites, which hold the remains of 14,000 people. They also want to know where 7,000 other victims were buried.

"It would be an emotional release for the families to know where the loved ones have been buried," said Kaminski, president of the foundation.

Even though Wiemeler has experienced some relief knowing that her father's body was buried in Katyn, she still harbors some resentment toward her father's tormentors.

"I'm not trying to fortify this at all," Wiemeler said, "but it's human nature that we do remember our lives. I can't help thinking, `Maybe my father would be alive if the Russian occupation hadn't happened.' "

At least now, she can temper her feelings with some humor.

For instance, she likes to tell friends how, for the memorial, the Polish government agreed to pay for the relatives' train transportation from Warsaw to Smolensk, a Russian city near Katyn, and for a meal after the ceremony at a restaurant in the same city.

"The Russian government, at first, said it would charge $20 per person for the restaurant meal," said Wiemeler, a reservations worker for Amtrak who lives in Harwood Heights.

"But then after we were leaving the Katyn Forest for the restaurant, they changed their minds and lowered their price."

When she and the others arrived at the restaurant, they barely had time to eat the first course, which consisted of a leaf of lettuce, four slices of cucumber, a teaspoon of coleslaw and six thin slices of cold cuts.

"Then, a Polish captain said, `I'm sorry, but the Russians decided the train will leave early and we will have to go to the station soon,' " she said.

"But when we got to the station, it turned out the train wasn't leaving early but at the time it was scheduled to leave.

"For me, it was classic," said Wiemeler, who was amused by the memory.

"It seems the Russian system still tries to use scare tactics so you never are certain of the next move. They were calling the shots again."

Another Chicago foundation member, Leopold Witkowski, also has deep personal reasons for wanting to see appropriate memorials erected at the cemeteries.

His father, a politician in Ostrog, Poland, and a captain in the reserves, is buried somewhere in Kharkov, where he was imprisoned in 1939.

Shortly after his father's murder, Witkowski and his stepmother and brother were among hundreds of thousands of Poles who were transported by the Russians to labor camps in Siberia.

There, Witkowski, 72, who was only in his teens, worked chopping wood, often in subzero weather, before he and thousands of others were released because the Russians could not spare any manpower to supervise the camps.

After the war, he lived in France for 10 years before immigrating to Chicago in 1956.

Now retired from his job as a superintendent at an ink-making plant, Witkowski has never returned to Eastern Europe since the war and doesn't intend to until something is done at the Kharkov site.

"I know it's been 55 years," Witkowski said recently at his Northwest Side home.

"I can't forget what the Russians did to myself, to my family and to my father. But it is time to forgive."